Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday November 17, 2009 @11:11PM
from the single-blind-testing dept.

EddieSpinola writes "Everyone knows that lossless codecs like FLAC produce better sounding music than lossy codecs like MP3. Well that's the theory anyway. The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files. Very interesting, if slightly disturbing reading!" Visiting with adblock and flashblock is highly recommended, lest you be blinded. The article is spread over 6 pages and there is no print version.

I'm sure I can tell 128 MP3 is not so good. it's sounds a bit hot to my ears. Oddly perhaps this happens especially when there is clipping in the music (see for example green day) or shreikin trebles ( "battle without mercy" kill bill sound track). At first this seemed counter intuitive to me since you think that adding more distortion would be the most easily hidden during distortion, right? My rationalization is that whatever the MP# psycho acoutic model is, it's best for music with harmonies and tonal trajectories in different registers (base, tenor, trebble) and not music that has all sorts of aliased frequencies randomly jumping around in volume. I dont' really know but I can hear it. With normal music you may not hear the change in intonation because it simply sounds equally good even if it is altered.

But By 192 MP3 I cannot tell the difference. 128 AAC seems to be about as good.

This could also have something to do with the way a lot of albums are mixed these days. Unfortunately, it seems that many studios are compressing the hell out of the music; I guess it has more to do with music industry execs thinking that their acts need to be louder to keep from being drowned out on the radio by the competition (who are also compressing their music into oblivion). I'm no audiophile but I abhor the practice; it has the effect of making the music come out of the speakers like a 747 on full throttle.

The bandwidth "ceiling" also has the deplorable effect of not giving the tracks room to "breath"; certain otherwise audible higher frequencies can get "lost in the sauce" (listen to an older recording and you'll hear the difference). The result is often akin to the difference between quietly closing a door and slamming it.

I think you're spot on with that guess. For example, Red Hot Chili Pepper's cd release of Stadium Arcadium [wikipedia.org] have been especially critisized for being too compressed [youtube.com] (a result of the loudness war [wikipedia.org]. Someone at hometheaterforum.com forum created a comparison between the CD [hometheaterforum.com] and the LP [hometheaterforum.com] (which had a much better mastering) release of the album, where you can clearly see the difference.

Now, the norm for most music released now is to mangle it in that way. And the audience is used to hear it that way too. So mp3 compression adding more artifacts to it and removing tones, thus mangling the music further, might sound "better" for a lot of the audience, because that's what they're trained to hear.

I empathize with you, and have a suggestion. For most venues, the music has to be loud so that everyone can hear it, including the people in the back. This means that those expensive front row seats (or elbowing your way up in a small venue) doesn't get you better sound; it just gets you a better view. And yes, that means that usually the music is way too loud to actually just listen to.

My suggestion is to look into foam earplugs. You can get a pack of Hearos earplugs at Target for very cheap. They'

A $70 pair of SHURE earbuds has made all the difference in how I listen to music

Sorry, but no earbuds are worth $70. They are simply evil and will destroy your hearing. Get yourself some proper earphones, something that cups the ear and ventilates.

One word for you: Grado. Highly recommended and reviewed at audiophile places. The lower end models price out at about the same as those earbuds, but with a superior sound. I recommend the SR80 - probably the best headphones in the price range. See Grado Labs [gradolabs.com] - a small company in Brooklyn that still makes their stuff in the US.

Disclaimer: I have no fiscal interest in Grado -- I just like their gear. I have owned a set of SR60 for over a decade, and I use my 4 year old SR80's at work. The SR-225 headphones I got for Christmas last year from my wife never leave the house - they are that good (And a bit pricey). These are the best sounding headsets I've ever owned or used.

I know the SR60s/SR80s win a lot of awards, but I've not been a fan of them. They don't have enough presence, and in any slightly noisy environment they got completely drowned out - either down to their not keeping ambient sound out, or not packing enough punch. In isolation, they are pretty good. They're also not as comfortable as a good sennheiser, for me, I find the foam a little scratchy. I'd like a comparison of the 80s with the 225s, though.

I use Sennheiser headphones myself--not because I'm an audio snob who thinks you MUST have Sennheisers or you're listening to crap--but because my headphones tend to take a lot of abuse and Sennheiser is the only company that sells a complete line of replacement parts for their headphones (which can be easily installed by a consumer). I got a little tired of snapping one wire or bracket on a set of expensive headphones and having to replace the whole set.

and Sennheiser is the only company that sells a complete line of replacement parts

Exactly. What happen to me is that the wire on the inside of the cable goes out, and I lose a channel.... it's happened on almost every set of headphones I have owned. When I finally purchased a pair of Sennheiser headphones, I just had to purchase a $8 cable, rather than an entire new set of headphones.

A $70 pair of SHURE earbuds has made all the difference in how I listen to music

Sorry, but no earbuds are worth $70. They are simply evil and will destroy your hearing. Get yourself some proper earphones, something that cups the ear and ventilates.

Citation needed.

I haven't seen any convincing evidence that earbuds damage your ears any more or less than any other style headphones. It's all about how loud the music is and how long you listen to it. Maybe the trick is that the big headphones are too clunky to take with you everywhere so you don't use them as often.

My Shure buds came with a little guide for how loud you should let your volume get for different listening durations. Of course, it's hard to tell how many decibels are coming out of your head

It's true! I was sitting there, minding my own business (or so I thought) and listening to some Shostakovich with some earphones while eating some fruit when, lo and behold, a dimensional rift open right up in my living room and a large two-headed octopus summoned itself right in front of me! Then, the octopus introduced itself as "Bill and Steve". One head, so it said, specialized in hellish gates, which were used to keep souls in, while the other specialized in Satanic jobs, which were used to secure the souls. I was scared out of my wits! Not only did I nearly choke on my apple, I was ready to jump out of one of my seven windows! Absolutely terrifying!

Fortunately, I knew a priest, so I asked him what I should do. He told me to say a Hail Mary every six months, dispose of the earphones, wipe the hard drive to my laptop, install Slackware, then, just to be certain that I cast out the demon, install Qemu and set up a pair of virtual machines, one running Gentoo and the other running Debian Stable. What I didn't realize until it was far too late, though, was that the priest was a prick. Granted, his suggested penance did indeed cast out the two-headed cephalopod from my apartment. However, I now have a serious infestation of daemons!

Slashdot, I pray to you! Tell me what I must do to cast out this new scourge!

You mean, digital will be able to introduce the flaws and errors that were part of the tape process?

Sometimes flaws improve art, like in the case of a film grain or desaturation can improving a particular photo. But you need to be sure that you're not just recreating a flaw because you're USED to it.

In the attached article, if people could distinguish between an MP3 and FLAC, it was because the MP3 was good enough no flaws could be detected. That's fine; people can't distinguish good compression from the real thing. However, if they COULD distinguish an MP3, but preferred to the flac, it was because they found the error pleasing... just like you and tapes.

well but that is what happens all the time - people get used to certain ways and later claim these are better than theoretically better products that came later. At the end what matters is opinion of the (I am afraid uneducated, hearing impaired and not caring) masses which cause certain solutions to succeed and others to fail without any sense and reason. In other words: which format is better may not matter that much if majority chooses the worse one, is happy with that decision and thinks it gives and a

Compare flac vc flac and look at the results. You can get all sorts of false information from this type of test. The 192kbps MP3 being distinguished from the FLAC could be just as significant as the Flac vs Flac graph

Although I would be the first to agree that there is a lot of snake-oil around in the so-called "audiophile" market, there is a place for everything. Despite the limitations, I do use compressed files on my iPod, simply because I am aware that when used with street earphones in a high ambient noise environment, the defects are much less noticeable.

Although I would be the first to agree that there is a lot of snake-oil around in the so-called "audiophile" market, there is a place for everything.

Snake oil? Nonsense.

Everybody calls stuff they don't understand "snake oil", and it's kind of a mistake in the high end audio market. Snake oil is the preferred suspension media for high-end tweeter frames. It is used to fill the struts that mechanically isolate the speaker from the cabinet, ensuring the only hiss you get is that which was on the original recording.

And despite what the so-called audiophiles say, you only have to replace it annually, not quarterly. Snake oil doesn't break down as fast as the other common organic oils (cod or shark liver oil is what most manufacturers recommend,) so it retains its useful viscosity for up to several years. It's absolutely a good idea to replace it before it degrades, but since it's only slightly more expensive than fish oils (at $16.00/ounce [oldwestsnakeoil.com]) when you change it annually it's actually a bargain.

The only problem with snake oil is that since it is an organic oil, it is susceptible to bacterial infection. An infected cylinder doesn't really affect the sound, but the oil tends to give off a foul odor if you let it sit around too long. Some people have tried smearing vaseline around the exposed ends of the inner cylinders to seal the oil so it won't stink, but I think that can affect the sound and I wouldn't recommend it.

Oh, and be sure to get a good quality measuring syringe to change the oil. Being off by more than a few mL can affect the travel of the struts, and that either leaves a mess on the shelf, or raspy highs.

"I think that the choice of playback software or drivers can also affect fidelity of the sound."

Indeed, pick any two media players that don't use the same decoder, they will both sound slightly different. Plus most default to 16bit, when the media might be 24bit (including mp3), or 32bit for FLAC, and others.

Driver implementation matters as well, I use the same drivers for my audio card for Windows XP (which the drivers were designed for), and Win7, but they both sound different, Win7 is slightly softer sounding, in XP it sounds a bit more over-driven, can't really compare between Linux distros as they almost never use the same drivers, and I usually don't bother to play with it, if it has sound, that's good enough.

I think any "optimized for metal" sound in Linux might be due to a more direct interaction with the hardware, which is great if you have hardware to support it, not if it's generic.

Because they were under the impression that one was better than the other, so they chose the one they thought would be better as per random chance. I'd actually like to see some real testing done to find a statistically significant difference with a large enough sample size. The audiophile shit has always been tainted by a sense of superiority. The thing with the MP3s however is that chances are there is at least some subset of the population that can tell the difference.

A large number of people rating MP3 higher than FLAC would then suggest that a large number of people chose randomly...

Please turn in your random number generator at the door.

In a sample size this small, you could easily see 75/25 splits without being able to determine that the results are not random. Remember that a random set is random from one through infinity. There's a lot of opportunity for 'luck' between those digits when you're only looking at a small portion of it.

Because the subjects rated the 320 MP3 (supposedly the worse) as better sounding than FLAC (supposedly the best).

Actually, an equal number preferred the 320 Kbps MP3 and the FLAC encoded files. It was the 192 Kbps MP3s that was preferred by a higher number of people than the FLAC, by a margin of eight to six. So the 192 Kbps MP3s also received more votes than the 320 Kbps MP3s.

As others have stated, people have become accustomed to the sound of MP3s encoded at a lower bit rate, and people tend to prefer something that's familiar. That's why your kid will turn his nose up at that gourmet meal you worked your ass off to prepare and ask for a Big Mac instead.

The part of the article I found most instructive was this:

The only person to get all four tracks right is someone who listens to their headphones at pitifully low volumes and hasn't attended any rock concerts.

Your ears will always be the most important part of the signal path when it comes to judging fidelity.

I think it's also worth noting that there are other reasons besides audio fidelity to consider other formats. The MP3 format introduces a small amount of silence at the beginning of the track track as it encodes - and decodes - the file. Because the standard has no way of accounting for this padding, it can not be removed during playback, resulting in annoying gaps between tracks that can ruin your enjoyment of live, classical or prog rock albums that really need to be listened to as a continues piece of music. Ogg Vorbis was designed to account for this padding during playback, and lossless formats like FLAC do not introduce padding in the first place, so for that reason alone those formats are preferable over MP3.

As others have suggested, the best scenario would be to encode your library of music in a lossless format like FLAC, then encode those files as needed in either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis for listening on portable devices.

I had been buying things from iTunes (128kbps AAC) and noticed no problems in my car or with my cheap computer speakers (with various computer noises in the room). I had, however, burned a few disks from iTunes and played them on my low end component system. Again, all was reasonably well until I played classical music that way.

When I first played downloaded classical music on that system I thought that something was broken. It was truly and horribly unlistenable. It took me a while to isolate the problem, but after other disks played fine and this disk played "fine" in my computer and car I finally figured out what the problem was.

Between that time and the introduction of iTunes+ (256kbps AAC) I stopped getting compressed classical (and some jazz) tracks.

What was so surprising about this experience is that (a) I hadn't set it up as a test of my hearing, but I noticed the difference entirely spontaneously. Indeed it hadn't even occurred to me that this might be an issue. And (b) I don't at all consider myself to be an audiophile. My hearing really isn't all that good.

The lesson is that what matters is what you hear with your music in your listening environment. In my most common listening environments it's all good. And with most of my music it's all good. But with a small subset of my music in one of my listening environments, bit rates can make the difference between unlistenable to perfectly enjoyable.

The brain bases the "quality" of music you listen to on the majority of music you have listened to in your younger ears. If that has been mp3, well then you would "prefer" an mp3 sound, weird as that may be. This is the same phenomenon that is responsible for people preferring vinyl over CD, for example. Try the same experiment on your kids and yes, they will prefer the mp3 version. If you were already listening to a lot of music when mp3s hit the mainstream, you'll probably find you prefer the lossless ver

If the mix doesn't sound good on almost any device, it wasn't mixed well. Audiophiles seem to think we don't take the fact that most people don't have high-end audio gear and lossless audio into account.

Oh, absolutely. There is no doubt that the biggest problem, by far, is the upfront engineering, not the file format. I have plenty of DDD CDs and other items where the digitization of the data involves essentially no loss - but are still terrible recordings that are painful to listen to. Only when everything else it darn near ideal does the compression method/bit rate even become detectable. And the vast, vast majority of cases, and as far as I know never for any portable device, are the conditions ideal. A crappy 128K MP3 of a good performance with good engineering can be a joy.

The results are not at all surprising to me. And of course the "audiophile" community is "stuck on stupid" in some cases. ANYONE who thinks information recorded in tiny wiggles in groves and played through a bunch of springs (stylus, cartridge coils, tonearm, not to mention the non-trivial compliance of the record itself) and then amplified by two-three orders of magnitude is a more accurate representation than a full digital string (almost independent of bit rate) is deluding themselves.

You forgot that they also use special tripolarity magnetic alignment cordage with tru-neg vacuum standoffs to perpendicularly align the electrons and thus properly reproduce the non-hertzian frequences.

Sure. Anybody that pretends a '60s British roadster can hold a candle in maneuverability, acceleration, or top speed against a modern-day fuel injected Honda Accord (!) is deluding themselves.

No, seriously [youtube.com]. Heck, if you really want to blow your mind, consider the fact that a Honda Odyssey - yes, a minivan! - handles objectively "sportier" [grassroots...sports.com] (i.e. has more grip, more acceleration, more top speed, etc.) than roadsters from the era of vinyl. Of course, it's not as much "fun" to drive a dependable minivan as it is to drive a two-seater with tiny tires and an engine that overheats after ten minutes, but, then again, it's not as much "fun" to listen to digitally reproduced music compared to the nostalgic experience of picking up a piece of vinyl and gently placing it on a record player.

ANYONE who thinks information recorded in tiny wiggles in groves and played through a bunch of springs (stylus, cartridge coils, tonearm, not to mention the non-trivial compliance of the record itself) and then amplified by two-three orders of magnitude is a more accurate representation than a full digital string (almost independent of bit rate) is deluding themselves.

You have no grasp whatever how a turntable works. The "tiny grooves and wiggles" are a very precice analog of the sound waveforms themselves.

This sort of comment is a bit frustrating to me. Some can tell the difference between even the most minute differences in lossy vs lossless. They may be a dramatic minority, but all the same, they are entitled to spend 3 month salary on their equipment to enjoy music as they see fit.
Similarly, I can't enjoy a $1000 bottle of wine any more than a $100 bottle; but that's no reason to say that a $100 bottle of wine is just as good as the $1000 wine because the vast majority can't tell the difference.
I recognize the validity of you're point, in that most can't tell the difference, but would like to pretend they can.

Likewise there's no reason to say that a $100 bottle of wine isn't better than a $1000 bottle just because someone is willing to pay for it. Frankly anything over $30 is a waste of money. All your paying for is rarity, not quality.

Likewise there's no reason to say that a $100 bottle of wine isn't better than a $1000 bottle just because someone is willing to pay for it. Frankly anything over $30 is a waste of money. All your paying for is rarity, not quality.

I think you missed it, regarding wine -- you have it backwards. Quality is rarity. Poor quality stuff is very common. Higher quality is usually a fortunate circumstance of a particular harvest of a particular grape in a particular area of a particular vineyard, and combined with a good vintner's touch. So high quality is a rare thing. Its not the rarity that makes it pricey, its the fact that high quality wine is remarkably rare and therefore pricey.

It used to be that anybody could buy a good wine -- if he was wiling to shell out the money. Any fool could walk into a reputable wine store with $100 and walk out with a very good bottle of wine. The expert was somebody who could walk out with a good bottle of wine after spending $15.

Things have changed. Vintners are very scientifically skilled at producing very consistent, reasonably good wine no matter what the year's growing conditions were like. As a resul

Give me the most highly rated Zinfandel and I probably would give a pretty low reguard compaired to a more moderately rated Shiraz, the same goes for region, I personally think the highest quality Australian or South American wines pale in comparison to the mid-line quality wines from Sonoma or France.

Obviously this is a matter of taste, but personally I'd have to disagree, at least with regard to the Australian stuff. Several mid-range Australian wines (e.g. Penfolds Bin 389) compare favourably with simil

128bps is certainly not enjoyable for certain classical pieces. By the time you've hit 192, it's fine. At 320kbps I can't tell the difference. If that means I have "tin ears" I'm thankful for them. They save me thousands of dollars in high end equipment and they save me using obscure poorly supported lossless formats and then having to convert to mp3 half the time anyway.

Most people are used to the slight hiss or static that comes with MP3's. In fact, we have lived with it so long, we believe it's normal. It's a form of bias, where most people are used to the sound of MP3's.

It's not really a static or hiss issue. Generally, the issue is a high-frequency warble as the compression picks different frequencies to hide the compression noise. If you listen to a 128kbps MP3 for a song with loud cymbal crashes, it becomes very noticable (and once you hear it, you always will). Personally, I can't hear this on 192kbps or higher MP3, but it's likely still there in small amounts.

Of course, when listening in noisier environments (car, earbuds, etc) the other sounds mask this, at least

The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s. "I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,"

He compared the phenomenon to the continued preference of some people for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. "Some people prefer that needle noise -- the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves," he said. "I think there's a sense of warmth and comfort in that."

All of this to say that the article isn't really testing anything. I mean, they ask seven people (five of which work for the website) to guess which tracks are what format, blindly. They admit something along the lines that Massive Attack fooled them more than other styles (Probably has more to do with the Loudness war [wikipedia.org] than anything else) And they conclude that 192 KBPS is "good enough".

Yes, and so were casettes back in day? They sounded good too. So what exactly did they test here? The ability to enjoy music? Our tolerance for advertising?

That's largely the point. The "good enough" mark is largely dependent upon the complexity of the music more than just about anything. Some very simple music might sound very good at only 128kbps, whereas more complex music might demand to have the entire 192kbps.

I thought the conclusion going back quite a while was that 192kbps was good enough for pretty much anybody and that anymore than that was really just for specialty use.

I think a large part of it is also how the music is recorded. The older recordings are recorded at a much lower level, taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the medium. The newer recordings are all packed into the loudest little bit so the dynamic range is compressed.

Add to that the simple fact that most people today listen to music that's digitally encoded on tiny little earplugs.

Now expose them to a full orchestra in a well-designed sound hall. They simply have no basis for hearing the range of

One problem is the simple A/B and asking which people like better. Well that is fine if you are doing something like testing two compression formats to see which has a sound people prefer. That is not fine if the question can people tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed music. For that you need an ABX test. X is a reference uncompressed sample, A and B are randomized such that one is uncompressed, one is not. People are then asked to identify the one that is the same as X. A test like that lets you tell if people can hear a difference, regardless of if they like it or not.

Also there is another angle to why people might choose to use uncompressed music and that is if there is any additional processing (like equalization) planned for later. Psychoacoustic compression schemes can have problems when processed later. Reason being that they do rely on things like masking, in that because X is happening, we can't hear Y. However when the balance of the sound is altered, well then that isn't necessarily the case anymore.

How important is that? Probably not very in a lot of cases. However how important is storage space? Last I checked 1TB was under $100. Storage is cheap. There's not really a need to milk every last bit out of a file. FLAC'd discs are in the realm of 300MB for a full CD. Big deal. I'm got space to spare, so why not go lossless?

What it really comes down to is what is "good enough" really depends on the situation. Depends on the music (some kinds cause more trouble for encoders), the listener, the environment, storage constraints and so on. I mean 64k is good enough to recognize the music. A 64k AAC or WMA is fine, FM radio quality maybe, and even a 64k MP3 is listenable. Is there distortion over what was on the CD? Sure, but maybe it is good enough in some situations (like say you need to be able to transmit stereo audio on a single DS-0 channel).

I really don't like these tests that try to give the one magic rate is that is good enough for all situations. Especially when they use bad testing methodology.

Personally, I'm a fan of lossless compression because then there's just not any additional errors. I've got the space so why not eliminate potential problems?

It's of my understanding that when you rip CDs to WAV or FLAC, you don't have an option to normalize your audio like you do with MP3s. It's not that you can't, rather the option is not available on most programs.

Audiophiles have known for decades that most listeners cannot discern excellent from mediocre music. Most people think that if there is lots of bass and the music is loud without obvious distortion, their system is great.

Audiophiles have known for decades that most listeners cannot discern excellent from mediocre music. Most people think that if there is lots of bass and the music is loud without obvious distortion, their system is great.

Most people have known for decades that audiophiles are full of crap. Every single time I've seen a double-blind test to see if they can hear the difference on what they claim they can hear, turns out they can't. Hey, good for the people selling them $1,000 audio cables.

That said, there's a good reason to go with FLAC. Want to re-encode a lower quality version for your storage-space-limited device? You can do that without additional quality loss, just like re-ripping from the cd. Want to change your collection to ogg because it sounds better at lower bitrates? Again, go ahead.

Basically, it's nice having a hard drive copy that is lossless, because you can re-encode it into the lossless codec of your choice for whatever device you want without introducing further artifacts.

When you want to listen to a lot of movies at dolby reference levels without any noticeable distortion in a larger room you are going to spend a lot more on speakers because movies frequently output levels below 20hz (even if you can't hear the sound it is outputting you can feel it and definitely hear the port noise on the subwoofer)

The problem is a lot of the people who think they are audio knowledge gods will buy the $1000 cables even if lab eq

Vinyl is the only format of the three that contains very high and very low frequency data that you cannot hear.

I'm sorry, but this simply isn't the case. Vinyl absolutely cannot "contain" any loud low frequency stereo signal - at least, nothing that was put there intentionally. The groove would become so shallow the needle would pop out of it and go skidding across the platter. You might be able to record a very soft low-frequency signal onto vinyl, but given the way human hearing works, that would almost certainly be masked by louder low frequency signals further up the audio spectrum in the music. Unless you like to sit around and listen to the output of a pure tone generator, this isn't really much of an "advantage" for vinyl.

Vinyl's inability to handle even moderately loud low bass is the reason why the sound of dance music changed so much starting in the mid-'80s - eventually resulting in things like house music - as CDs became popular and suddenly you could record deep bass at maximum volume and deliver it to consumers unaltered. I recall hearing Pet Shop Boys "I Want A Dog" in 1988 or thereabouts on a high-end sub/sat system at an audio dealer and thinking, "Holy crap! How did they get the bass so loud?" It felt like I'd swallowed a subwoofer it was so loud. You couldn't physically deliver anything like that on vinyl - you would have to roll the deep bass off by many decibels or the groove would literally go flat. Even most consumer tape formats would have had trouble handling that much low-frequency signal, especially given the tape duplication methods used at that time (although at least they'd fail less spectacularly, with tape's fairly warm-sounding saturation).

Discos in the '70s could pump out that kind of deep bass, but they did it using a gadget from dbx called a subharmonic synthesizer, which would produce a note exactly an octave below whatever you fed into it. They'd feed your typical vinyl recording with its anemic bass into the device, and get this pulsating, throbbing audio out. But until CD came around there was no way to deliver that to the home, maybe short of half-speed mastered reel to reel or (possibly) metal cassette tape.

You do get all sorts of low frequency signal coming off of vinyl when you play it, but it's mostly noise - rumble from the motor and pickup in the turntable itself, the scraping of the needle in the groove, low-frequency resonances induced by the playback speakers, and harmonics and low-frequency noise etched into the master itself when that was being cut. All of that garbage robs power from your amplifier and causes scads of distortion in your speakers, screwing up the real signal you're trying to reproduce. It's just another way in which vinyl is not only an awful audio format, but a spectacularly awful audio format. It's not just awful because of what it can't accurately record, it's awful because of all of the noise and artifacts it introduces which cause further distortion of what it has managed to accurately record.

As for high frequency data, yes vinyl can record signals higher than the 20kHz limit of CD, but if you're over 13 and live in the West it's unlikely you can hear any of it. Worse, each time you play a record the needle actually damages it, and the high frequencies are damaged the first and the worst. That's one of the many reasons why the old discrete quad format failed back in the '70s - it used ultrasonic multiplexing to record the quad signal, and that signal rapidly degraded with every playback. Whoops! (The matrix quad formats - which didn't rely on ultrasonics - failed for other reasons.) Beyond that, the vast majority of what signal there is over 20kHz on most vinyl records is pure unadulterated noise which has absolutely nothing to do with the original signal that was recorded. It's hiss, it's harmonic distortion induced in both the cutting head and in your pickup's needle by lower-frequency signals, it's from clicks and pops caused by dust or by imperfections

First of all people who purchase Monster Cables, Gold Plated Cables, and all that crap are utterly clueless. The gold is plated and only a couple or angstroms thick, in other words it is worthless.

A thing or two about cables...

For carrying the output of the main amplifier to the speakers, ANY cable that can handle the power load without overheating and starting your house on fire will work fine. We are talking high voltage and current levels.

I have found that though I can tell the difference between a FLAC and 128Kbps MP3, most of my friends can't. Most of them, if I play the same song back to back, one FLAC and one MP3, they will almost always pick the MP3.:( Thus far, except for me, the only reason I can justify ripping things to FLAC is because I can then convert the file to whatever loss compression format is needed, MP3, AAC, OOG, etc.for portable music players (yes people, the iPod is not the only music player), without the double compression loss.

> I have found that though I can tell the difference between a FLAC and 128Kbps> MP3, most of my friends can't. Most of them, if I play the same song back to> back, one FLAC and one MP3, they will almost always pick the MP3.

You may not be able to tell the difference between MP3 and the original CD audio, but as soon as you subtract the right channel from the left channel, you sure can. Elements which would perfectly cancel from subtraction instead sound warbly.

A protip that doesn't suggest a wooden volume knob?! Any audiophile worth his Monster cables knows that micro vibrations created by the volume pots and knobs find their way into the delicate signal path and cause audio degradation. I imagine you knew this, but the fact you omitted it is a disservice to this great community!

It all really depends on the bit rate of the MP3, the type of music you are listening to and the equipment you are using to listen to the music with. It also depends if you know what you are listening for. For example between 128Kbps and 192Kbps MP3 I find the former flatter than the latter.

Most people greatly overestimate how well they can hear these differences, but the never actually try it in ABX testing. I tried it years ago and I can't hear a difference between most codecs at reasonable bitrates and unencoded originals.

Here is an old classic from the Hydrogenaudio forums, from someone would bought expensive head phones and set up ABX testing. He was very shocked when he couldn't even tell the difference between FLAC and Vorbis at 64kb/s.

The conclusion of the article is significant: "The only person to get all four tracks right is someone who listens to their headphones at pitifully low volumes and hasn't attended any rock concerts. We can think of two explanations. One, the subject has particularly sensitive ears, so doesn't need to turn the volume up high. Two, the subject hasn't wrecked their hearing through years of listening to a walkman/MP3 player at high volumes and/or seeing Motorhead at the Hammersmith Odeon. Arguably, both apply."

It's related to how the brain handles white balance when it comes to colours. Your brain compensates for missing, or contradictory information. After a while you get used to it and don't notice it, and then when you are presented with something closer to 'perfect' you may, or may not recognize it as being all that different.

Sat Radio has relatively poor quality, but after listening to it for an hour or two the artifacts get filtered out by my brain (all but the worst ones anyway) and I don't notice it; but expose somebody to it for the first time and they will cringe.

I kinda find it funny that you need to have adblock and flashblock to visit a site named TrustedReviews so your browser doesn't go into a tailspin... It's like having Sid Fernwilter smile at you and say "Trust me!"

Anyway, 192kbps MP3's is good enough for most people so I don't really see the point with FLAC unless you are an audiophile which means you don't touch encoded/compressed music anyway.

I've never been able to hear the difference but my hearing isn't great and I'm not a music person so I wasn't completely sure. But this isn't that surprising. Note how the audiophile community has so many strange ideas about what sounds better that James Randi has actually bothered to include some of their claims as acceptable for his million dollar challenge (this is a prize if you can demonstrate supernatural or paranormal abilities under controlled conditions- http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-chal [randi.org]

I've been saying this for years - it is not hard to reach a point where an MP3 is indistinguishable from the uncompressed source, "even if you have top notch equipment and well-practiced hearing skills."

It is basically scale of bitrate vs odds that the recording will be indistinguishable at that bitrate.

My personal experience tells me that most songs are audibly degraded at 128kbps, some songs are audibly degraded at 160kbps, few songs are audibly degraded at 192kbps, and nothing I've yet experienced is audibly degraded at 256kbps. And this is being conservative... with a superior modern codec like LAME, MP3 may be even harder to distinguish at 128kbps than you might expect. Other codecs besides MP3 could be even better, but I don't have enough experience with other codecs, so I can't comment there. Plus, VBR makes the situation even better. You could have a lower average bitrate but still achieve a signal thats indistinguishable from the original with VBR.

Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as.wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp. An $80 1TB hard drive can hold $19,000 worth of uncompressed CDs. Sure... in flac format I could store more like $60,000 worth... but who has a $20,000 CD collection let alone a $60,000 one?

Anyway, the primary counterarguments I've heard are either from neurotic audiophiles that think "mathematically lossy" means "audibly lossy." People from that same category justify multi-thousand-dollar power cables to their amplifier and claim night and day differences, so their opinions can safely be ignored.

The other end of the fence says low bitrate stuff sounds "perfect." In my experience when presented with a reasonable comparison, even audio-ignorant people can tell the difference between a crap 128kbit mp3 and the original, but that difference might not be immediately obvious on, for example, built-in laptop speakers.

MPEG 1 layer 3 (MP3) encoding was designed as a 'perceptual encoding' algorithm where less "effort" (fewer bits) is given to signals that fall below below a threshold based on the other signals present. For example, a quiet tone close in frequency to a loud tone cannot be heard by the human ear, so no effort needs to be expended on reproducing it. All we're debating is whether the engineering behind this is sufficient. Certainly at lower encoding rates the distortion characteristics get very weird, thoug

With most real music (as in not coming out of a sequencer with the highs already filtered out), yes, you can tell if your upper frequency hearing is toasted by too many rock concerts. You can tell most definitely with some specific songs that sound like crap even in the vocal range if it's lossy ("Sad To See the Season Go" by Cowboy Junkies, in particular).

Hi-hats or any other cymbal, bells, glockenspiels, etc., all sound like shit in anything below 256. I can't describe the distortion other than to say it sounds hissy. Go ahead, listen to ANY Police tunes in low bitrate. I defy you to not cringe at how MP3 ruins Stuart Copeland's percussion.

The only music that doesn't suffer badly from mp3's lossy distortion is electronica and its related genres. Erasure sounds just fine at 192.

I've been exposed to people who write audio codecs for a living. They can tell because they've become sensitive to the artifacts present in MP3s. They also can pick up problems with CD's that haven't been dithered properly. They can easily pick out MP3 even at 320kbps. These are specialists. But even in this study there was one individual who had a high success rate.

At 192K and a good pair of headphones with good material I think most people could learn pretty quickly to pick up the difference - loss of stereo image at higher frequencies is pretty easy to pick up.

There are also studies available that point out the advantages of high bit rate recordings - these enable the use of sophisticated filters that eliminate some of the issues present with CD sound. If you are interested and have a mathematical bent, look up the work of Meridian's Peter Craven. Again the differences can be detected by specialists. I'm old enough so that my ears are not good enough to pick up these improvements.

I rip to FLAC and convert for my portables because of these factors.

If you want to try some testing yourself visit hydrogenaudio. They have apps set up to do abx comparisons so you can test yourself.

The small size of lossy audio was an important factor when storage capacity was limited. This is no longer an issue, so there's not much reason to bother with lossy music when dealing with the storage capacity of current devices. 100GB of music would be an absolutely massive collection, yet that would only occupy less than 10% of a US$100 1TB drive. The 16GB common is portable devices is enough for more FLAC than you would listen to for even a fairly lengthy journey. It's certainly still of use in streaming media, but the bar for quality isn't usually set very high in that area. Full CD quality FLAC streams should be usable on home broadband within 5 years, I would hope...

The reasons to argue against FLAC just aren't that relevant anymore. Bits are cheap, who cares if you save a few?

Most people have spent so much time with iPod earbuds that they've killed their hearing, and that's why they can't tell the difference between formats. Besides, I think most audiophiles would agree that it's file format + speakers/headphones that make a difference.

Now, I'm not saying that everything should be in FLAC and you should blow your budget on $500 headphones, since most people probably won't be able to tell the difference, however, I consider it just an accomplishment if people can enjoy their m

I did a study myself... One at a time, I took people off the street, and told them to make a rocket that could go into space. None of them could. The result is clear: space travel is impossible.

Lossy audio coding is an area of intensive scientific study. All the comments here amount to a bunch of 6 year-old kids debating where babies come from...

The answer to the question is quite simple, and has been known since the 1980's. The rule of Perceptual Entropy is that you need a minimum bitrate of 176kbps for 44.1kHz stereo. If you're encoding below that, it can't possibly be indistinguishable from the original. ITU-R BS.1116-1 testing has proven that simple fact out over and over again.

And don't bother claiming your 192kbps MP3s sound perfect, either. MP3 is certainly not the ideal audio format, so it doesn't come that close. But much more importantly, it (like all low-bitrate audio codecs) is a frequency domain codec, making it impossible to avoid pre-echo and the like AT ANY BITRATE. MP3, AAC, Vorbis, et al. just can't possibly do it.

The only possible competitors for indistinguishable (transparent) lossy audio coding are time domain codecs, primarily: MPEG-1 Layer II, and Musepack. Some hybrids like AC-3 exist as well.

Amateur testing is pretty pointless... You're no longer judging which sounds more like the original, you're picking the one whose distortions you like more. Low bitrate codecs often throw in a relatively small amount of noise, which masks artifacts, and simply sounds sufficiently different that it's no longer the same audio. Compare a song (from a CD), to the same after normalizing the volume, and you'll have the same problem... You'll probably pick the modified version as sounding better, even though both are lossy, and at first glance, the same audio.

I can certainly imagine the next generation of lossy audio codecs will pitch-shift music to an octave people generally prefer, to get a higher rating on such "tests". Cheap igital cameras often do the same thing... over-correcting gamma to make every picture more white (bluish, really) and turning up the contrast to make it more vivid, so much so that it looks "better than the real thing".

If you record a 22kHz square wave, you certainly don't need 176kbps to describe that as perfectly as uncompressed audio

Yes, but music is not a square wave. While there is some variation in "compressibility" (Kolmogorov complexity) the differences between various types and genres are not terribly significant. 88kbps/channel is the value established by Johnston while at AT&T, and it has held-up to all scrutiny quite well.

The present study suffers from that methodological malady known in scientific circles as being "fucked". Please bear with me as I explain this technical term.

The question posed in the text is 'can we tell the difference'. One assumes from this that the answer is yes or no. Testing this question would require playing two versions and asking whether they're the same (can't tell the difference) or different (can etc.).

But that's not what gets asked. The subjects get asked to tell which version sounds better. The question assumes they can tell the difference. Even if they can't tell the difference they are forced by the design to choose one over the other as if they can.

Since they are forced to say which sounds better even if they can't tell the difference (something impossible to determine from this design) then they are simply guessing or picking one arbitrarily, and there is no way to determine if or when this occurred. Thus, the results are not only unable to answer the original question, they are unable to answer anything because the data do not even necessarily represent answers.

The design is so fatally flawed that there is nothing that can be pulled out of it. It's complete garbage.

As an aside, I'm not familiar with the musical pieces used, but I'm betting they're fairly new. For years now recordings have been increasingly compressed by the engineers. Most popular works produced in this decade are already so compressed that you can't tell much difference between the original and a recording of it having been compressed yet again, no matter by what method.

To tell the difference between compressed versions one should start with an uncompressed source. And for a person to be able to hear a difference in two versions, they should already be familiar with the original in uncompressed form so they can try to say whether one sounds more like the original than the other (the alternative being both sound worse or both sound like it). If they have no clue what it's supposed to sound like, any attempt to say which sounds better is badly broken due to having no reference with which to compare them.

No attempt was made to determine whether the subjects even had normal hearing. And I don't mean just asked (though that should be done) but tested. People can have frequency drop outs that they're unaware of and that would affect the results.

There are so many problems with the study that it is completely useless. The problems were of the authors' making. Thus, they did not know what they were doing. This is what we mean by "fucked".

I want to know who determined that 'trusted' was a good name for the magazine/blog/honey wagon in which the article appears. I wouldn't trust them to test light bulbs to see if they're burnt out.

Since they are testing people's perceptions this is in part a psychological test. You cannot conduct perceptual tests directly because perception is affected by the conscious mind. Thus if you asked people "do you hear a difference," you are likely to get many false positives since you are predisposing people to seek a difference. Instead you ask people which one sounds better.

"even if they can't tell the difference (something impossible to determine from this design) then they are simply guessing or pickin

Some of your audiophiles will tell you that tube based amplifiers produce less distortion than transistor based models.

The truth is that they often produce MORE distortion, only the distortion that they produce is pleasing to the ear, where as the distortion created by transistor based amps tends to be unpleasant to listen to.

If listeners are rating MP3's as superior to FLAC, it is most likely because the psycho-acoustic models used by the codes are introducing artifacts that improve the sound of the music, at least according to the subjective opinion of those listeners.

What you have to realize is that there is no perfect recording of music or any other form of audio data. All music is distorted as compared to what it actually sounded like in the studio. Some of this distortion is deliberate, which is why you have all those knobs and dials on the mixing console. A lot of music nowadays is compressed, which creates more deliberate distortion. Encoding that analog data into a 16bit digital stream stream at 44khz produces yet more distortion.

At the end of the day you have to figure out what sounds best to you because all of it will have distortion of some sort or another.

Fraunhofer spent considerable time and effort to build a lossy codec that was indistinguishable, to most listeners, from uncompressed music (44.1/16-bit) files. mp3 codecs (and the improved codecs that followed, such as AAC or Ogg) all craft the file in such a way as to make the parts "thrown out" the least noticeable and the parts "we keep" the most important cues. Unlike other digital audio compression methods that preceded them, mp3 codecs are built from the ground up to retain most or all of the music signal that human hearing and the brain need to enjoy a satisfying musical performance, and to concentrate on discarding what seems unnecessary to that end.

That they succeeded is hardly groundbreaking news. That some listeners can tell the difference is also hardly groundbreaking news; there were a significant minority amongst Franuhofer's listening panels who were almost always able to discern which was which. At some point the majority of casual listeners were not able to do so with any consistency. That's when they said "OK, we'll use this method, then."

There is nothing wrong with well engineered lossy codecs, as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with sat radio or mp3 via computer or music player can easily attest. To say there is no difference, or that an mp3 is "CD quality", is the kind of hyperbole that can't go unchallenged. To be a bit more honest and say "it sounds pretty good" or "I like the way it sounds" is fine, however.

Most people are OK with some form of lossy codec; in the environment we most often listen these days, it's limitations are not drawbacks, and possibly not even evident (i.e. in a car; there is plenty of extraneous sound to mask most limitations of compressed audio; and as anyone who has ever used a sound pressure meter in a running vehicle on even a deserted road can tell you, the low-frequency noise of any automobile just going about it's business is very high and much of it is subsonic, which we can't normally hear but none the less masks lower-level detail information on music we might be listening to). It's not a crime to say you're OK with mp3, even if you can tell the difference between lossy and lossless formats.

There's a saying in the sound industry: "Musicians have the worst stereos". And, generally, they do. The reason has more to do with how they listen than what they're listening on: musicians will mentally fill in the sound by following the notes themselves, and things like the beat, the rhythm, the tone, and the timing of the players and their instruments. It's as if they are playing the notes themselves, in their heads, and they need only the elemental cues to do so.

If you love a song, you don't have to hear it under ideal conditions to enjoy the performance. These are the kinds of things Fraunhofer concentrated on making sure remained in the mp3 after compression. It's supposed to sound good; that was the whole point, and that's why the Fraunhofer codecs succeeded, despite the royalty payments due.

All that still does not take away from the enjoyment of uncompressed formats, reproduced competently by accurate equipment, in the appropriate environment. Your car or via earbuds on the street are not those types of environments, and mp3s etc are perfectly reasonable compromises between quality and the need for reduced data footprints. There is a place for both uncompressed and compressed formats; they are not mutually exclusive.

by now people have become so used to MP3 'sizzle' artifacts that they think it is part of the music, and have started preferring it to the cleaner original sounds.

it takes someone working in the studio or with an extremely keen ear listening on reference-grade monitoring to detect the artifacts in the compressed versions

I find it really disturbing that no one ever brings up the fact that these results will vary widely depending on the size of the listening space.
While my own experience is that at home (Genelec 1031A, Shure EC530 in-ear monitors, etc..) or in a small studio it is somewhat difficult to pick those
differences out, as soon as the same test is conducted in a larger acoustic space, they jump out to the point that it is obscene and hard to ignore.

As I have already said many times in previous posts here, we can sit here and argue all day long about which looks better on our laptop's LCD monitor, a 65 Kbytes.jpg
or a 82 Meg.tiff file of the same photo. Yet when we take these same two files and print them at 5' x 12' billboard size, the jpg file will appear so grossly grainy and pixelated,
while the.tiff file will maintain a much more coherent presentation of what the original picture looked like.

In other words, large-scale sound systems tend to act as magnifiers for these minute artifacts and differences which lossy audio compression introduces, and there is no
question in my mind that when the same tests are performed in an auditorium or a reasonably anechoic concert hall (in open air even better because no reflections) it
does immediately become quite apparent how much the lossy encoding process actually messes with the information.

It is not merely a function of frequency response, distortion and other lab specs, rather a more fundamental one of the poorly-understood characteristics that give music its
inner dynamic, the 'punch' in the low frequencies, the cleanliness in the top end and tails of reverbs, as well as many times the resultant waveforms of many combined
harmonic sounds in the midrange, probably a bit more so on acoutic instruments, but not always necessarily so.

I would welcome similar tests done on a reasonable sound reinforcement rig, like a typical line array system with 50,000 watts of power in a room which can accommodate
1,500 people, a pretty standard setup for concerts and DJ gigs. (keeping in mind that in such systems there is a digital processor in the chain through which the sound will pass)

There are much deeper implications to this, such as the fact that vinyl and open-reel while flawed to some extent still offer the human ear a much smoother experience
in acoustic spaces of that size, as CD and DVD players do a very poor job of reconstituting the the 'slices' of digital audio after D/A conversion, yes great master clocking will
make the signal sound more bearable, but there is a continuity between the waveforms which analog seems to do much better than most digital systems ever can at the sampling
rates they are currently working at, and which I am sad to report haven't really changed a lot since 1981 when the CD spec was developed, SACD being a step in the right direction.

That these older analog formats are not even included in the tests means pretty much the equivalent of the one-eyed man being crowned the leader of the kingdom of the blind.
Which is why to this day, many of the top professional DJs insist on playing from analog sources such as vinyl, which while they have certain inconvenient artifacts of their own, do offer
something else that the human ear craves for, and is really keenly attuned to: continuity of sound, and the smoothness of a natural waveform. This effect is clearly demonstrated by making
an high-quality open-reel tape copy of a CD, and playing the two side-to-s

An anecdotal tale from my previous life as a shop-floor assistant at a hi-fi store. We used to sell cheap consumer stuff alongside the serious amps and speakers but probably about a quarter of my customers genuinely preferred the sound coming from a cheap boombox to a more serious setup. It'd make my ears bleed it was so bad but it was the sort of sound they were used to and they liked it.

I disagree. I find the trend of many websites to split the articles into as many as 10 - 15 pages beyond annoying. My browser has a scrollbar for a reason, you don't have to paginate it for me. I know they are trying to increase ad revenue, but it makes me use those sites less. Or get an extension like auto pager.

These statements are becoming increasingly common in story summaries, and it's sadly ironic for a site that serves ads itself. How about cutting out the snarky anti-ad commentary and just sticking to the story?

Hey, I get that it's not the most visually appealing thing on the Internet:). I'm just really tired of the culture of bitching about ads wherein people honestly expect to get stuff completely free of charge or ads when producing said stuff costs money.

Operating a site with good content costs money. Most good sites are run for profit. If you visit a site and don't like the content, don't visit that site again.

Hey, I get that it's not the most visually appealing thing on the Internet:). I'm just really tired of the culture of bitching about ads wherein people honestly expect to get stuff completely free of charge or ads when producing said stuff costs money.

Remember when google wasn't the dominant search engine? You had yahoo, altavista, and the other guys filling up the search page with all sorts of ad banners. Google comes along with a very simple search page which is still there. Text ads only. A very large of information that you searched for, and only a few ads to the side.

Guess what? Most people don't bother blocking google's ads. And now they're the dominant player, because everyone would rather use them than their competitors.